New settler units on Palestinian land give Israel a powerful demographic weapon

LONDON: On July 11 last year, Nora Ghaith, 68, and her husband Mustafa Sub Laban lost their battle to keep their home in Jerusalem's Old City – where Ghaith was born – when Israeli police broke into their door and forced evict the elderly couple.

The expulsion of the last Palestinians living in a building now filled with settlers was carried out under a controversial law. This legislation allows Jews to reclaim properties that supposedly belonged to their families before their expulsion in 1948 and which were later occupied by Palestinian refugees.

The Legal and Administrative Matters Law was adopted in 1970 after Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem. The same law, however, does not allow the much larger number of Palestinians whose families were expelled from West Jerusalem in 1948 to recover the properties they lost.

In fact, the Absentee Property Law, passed in 1950 and amended in 1973, prevents Palestinians from recovering their lost properties.

Both laws are doubly unfair, critics say, because Jews who left East Jerusalem in 1948 were then given Palestinian properties in West Jerusalem as compensation and, by being allowed to “reclaim” properties in Jerusalem -East, they were doubly compensated.

Last year, the “deeply shocking and heartbreaking” expulsion of the Ghaith-Sub Laban family and many other Palestinian families in East Jerusalem was condemned by UN experts as “part of the machinery of Israeli apartheid at work, designed to consolidate Jewish ownership of Jerusalem.” and racially dominate the city's population.

The special rapporteurs on human rights said such expulsions constituted “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and a war crime” and evidence of “the intention to annex and colonize the occupied territory in violation of international law”.

Less than a year later, however, two Israeli non-governmental human rights organizations said that while the world's attention was focused on the death and destruction taking place in Gaza, there had been “a major acceleration in the promotion and acceleration of new settlements.” projects in East Jerusalem and a dramatic increase in the rate of Palestinian home demolitions.

The Israeli government is “clearly exploiting the war to create more facts on the ground to predetermine the final status of Jerusalem and thwart any prospect of a negotiated political settlement, while forcibly displacing Palestinians from their homes and the city” , Amy Cohen, director of international relations at Ir Amim, told Arab News.

Ir Amim, or City of Nations, is an Israeli NGO working “to make Jerusalem a more equitable and sustainable city for the Israelis and Palestinians who share it and to help achieve a negotiated resolution on the city.”

Research carried out jointly with Bimkom-Planners for Planning Rights reveals that between October 7 last year and March 10, some 98 Palestinian homes were demolished – a monthly increase almost twice that of the period before the war .

At the same time, there has been “a major increase” in efforts to create illegal settlements in East Jerusalem, either within or adjacent to Palestinian neighborhoods.

These plans provide for more than 12,000 housing units. With an average of 6.5 births per woman among ultra-Orthodox Jewish families recorded between 2019 and 2021, this means tens of thousands more settlers will move to East Jerusalem.

According to the most recent census, approximately 361,700 (61%) of East Jerusalem's population are Palestinian Arabs. The remaining 234,000 (40%) are Jewish – all considered by the international community to be illegal settlers in territory occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War.

The growing number of illegal settlements is particularly worrying in light of statistics of violent attacks in the West Bank. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, between 2008 and May 12 of this year, 1,498 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 10 times more than the 149 reported Israeli deaths.

There is an even greater disparity in the number of wounded on both sides: 95,383 Palestinians and 2,373 Israelis.

Israeli authorities are “certainly exploiting the current circumstances, taking advantage of the fact that the international community is clearly overwhelmed by the horrific and catastrophic conditions in Gaza and all their implications,” Cohen said.

“So while attention is diverted there – and the Israeli government is complicit – settler movement activists are actually taking advantage of the circumstances to create more 'facts on the ground.'

These “facts” are motivated by the Israeli government's policy “to ensure that Jerusalem remains what it often calls the 'eternal and united capital of Jerusalem' and to preserve the city's essence as a Jewish capital.”

“This means not only that they must ensure control of as much space as possible, but also of the demographic balance of the population – the demographic majority must be in favor of Israeli Jews, which is achieved by targeting the Palestinian population. »

She added: “These policies and these measures essentially impose a cap on the Palestinian demographic, which constitutes a form – and it's even horrible to say this – but a form of displacement and control of the population, to ensure that 'there will be a Jewish people. demographic majority in the city.

“And that resulted in demolitions. »

Since October 7, plans for no fewer than eight new settlements in East Jerusalem have been accelerated.

The fear, Cohen said, was that the situation was approaching a tipping point beyond which implementing a two-state solution would become impossible.

“If the international community sat down today with the representatives of Israel and the Palestinian Authority and started to sit down and develop some kind of road map, it would be very, very different from what she was 20 years ago, at Camp David or even before that, during the Oslo Accords,” she said.

“Obviously, any roadmap will have to be adapted to today's reality. You cannot reverse most of what has happened so far in Jerusalem. But you can certainly prevent what Israel is trying to do right now.

“It is therefore above all necessary to truly tackle the problem here and now, to stop major developments on the ground in favor of settlements and to put an end to mechanisms of displacement, such as demolitions and evictions. »

She added: “If the international community is truly serious about a two-state solution, it must act now to hold Israel accountable to international law and the parameters of a two-state solution, and so far, we haven't seen that. »

Since the start of the war, new debates have taken place on the need to relaunch a new peace process, to renew dialogue with a view to a negotiated and agreed resolution.

“But with that, we have to bring the centrality of Jerusalem back into the debate, because without Jerusalem, there really is no two-state solution.

“And as we all know, without a two-state solution, we will not be able to achieve peace and security for all of us, Israelis and Palestinians, living between the river and the sea.”